My Perspective on InOneWeekend 2008
Wow. 100 people. Jeff Stamp, the inventor of Baked Lays, and creative facilitator extraordinaire, freed our minds Friday night. $408,000 in sweat equity over 3 days. Sitting in with the finance team watching them vet a million scenarios. Working on the business team to dive deep into competitive analysis and gather real-world statistics that ground our business plan in reality. The unveiling of the creative work in branding and design that continued to motivate us as we watched our idea come to life. Feeling for the tech team as they scrambled to find a place to work after our building locked up at midnight. Management and Ops putting together a phased in plan to ramp up staff and bring our product to market. Sales and marketing taking our analysis and putting together a plan to capture market and mind-share. Cincinnati has some freakishly smart and creative people. Watching what we all did when we came together – priceless. At least for now. With hopes of great riches when the thing takes off.
And after 3 days we created…well, I can’t quite say yet. You’ll find out next week.
InOneWeekend will happen again, and when it does, you owe it to yourself to be there.
Sure, we launched a new business. The larger effect is the impact the weekend will have on Cincinnati. Many great people who had similar mindsets came together to share their stories and lives as we bonded over the focused goal of doing this in one weekend. In attendance were serial entrepreneurs, fashion designers, business owners, software developers, sales people, print designers, university professors, college students, management executives, and so much more. The depth and breadth of experience, and the relationships we built and shared over the weekend, will strengthen our local market as all these driven people with great ideas have now met each other and can begin to leverage each others’ strengths in the local marketplace.
The long run vision? Well, more local innovation, more local business startups, more local creative work. College graduates having a reason to stay here because our local economy and community will give them a compelling reason to follow their dreams here. Talented managers and leaders not needing to move away to bring new products to market. It’s a win all around. And there were so many people in attendance who just loved Cincinnati and wanted to find a way to cheerlead our community. I think we’ve found one more way.
I’ll be writing my thoughts on some leadership lessons, teamwork, the mindset of an entrepreneur, as well as some of the great people who attended the event. If you were there, please feel free to chip in. Either leave a comment below, or write a post and I’ll get it up here with credit to you.
Thanks again everyone for a great weekend!
- Andy
July 14th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Hey, Andy, it was great fun working with you. What you wrote above is so very true. I’ve been bullish on Cincinnati for a long time, and events like IOW give me confidence that my beliefs are something more than naive optimism.